Short Memoir

Turn! Turn! Turn!

My view of the crowd was obstructed, but Mel stood out as she walked between the tables of the bar. She was tall, and her giant hazel eyes glowed in the dark like an animal. The Freakin’ Frog was a college bar in Las Vegas, and it wasn’t an ideal place for music, especially the experimental symbiosis of slam poetry and jazz rock my friends and I were attempting, but it was an easy way to gain exposure amongst an older, hipper crowd. A fat man from Philadelphia was the sound guy, and he was employed by his wife, who booked the live acts. He could never get the sound to travel through the entire bar, so the people who came for the bands would sit on the floor at the foot of the stage. Mel sat up front. She was wearing a long blue dress, with a white flower petal pattern stamped on the fabric, which she called her “old woman gown,” and tattered, black Doc Martens. Standing on stage, holding my guitar, my playing reflected the exact vibe I was picking up from her. I was nervous. My fingers trembled across the fret board, and I stumbled over my ideas. I repeated guitar licks that were rehearsed and inscribed in my brain because I couldn’t think of anything original. Darren, the piano player, signaled for me to take a solo, but I only managed to squeak out one note. To make the note interesting, I started speed picking, getting softer, then louder, and the band crescendoed along. They had saved me from utter humiliation. Mel was watching me, and only me, and I knew it.

The gig ended, and I stormed backstage to pack my equipment into the car. I wanted to find Mel. Some friends wandered behind the stage to greet me and shake my hand, but my hand was limp, and all I wanted to do was get into the bar before the crowd began filing out. I grabbed my guitar and amplifier, shoved them into the trunk of Darren’s SUV, and darted back inside the bar. There were empty chairs strewn across the bar floor, and as I plowed through them, I noticed Mel was standing by the exit, hugging friends. I stopped. My body wouldn’t let me move forward; my shoes felt heavy like cinderblocks. She turned out the door, and the last thing my eye caught was a glimpse of her dress blowing in the wind as the door shut slowly.

I knew Mel from high school, but I was older, she was cooler, and our paths never crossed. It was the summer before my junior year of college, and my friends and I were being annoyingly artistic around town, having art shows, slam poetry events, and concerts every month; Mel was at all of them. The Freakin’ Frog was our final event, and Mel was like a mom and pop store product viewed from the sidewalk, through a glass window, that I had been contemplating over long enough; I needed to break through and take her.

The air conditioning in my car was broken, and I was stuck with my mother’s yellow convertible beetle for the night. I walked into the parking lot of the Frog, pondering whether I should bring a case of Heineken or Corona to Darren’s to celebrate our last gig of the summer, when I saw Mel standing with a group of friends, only a few spaces away from the beetle. She saw me and waved. 

“Great show tonight,” she said. 

I walked toward her. “You liked it?” I mumbled. 

She nodded, smiling, then peered behind me. “Sweet ride.”

I laughed. “It’s my mom’s.”

“Don’t lie,” she said, then looked in my eyes. “You’re Alex, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re Mel. We went to high school together.”

“I remember. You’re the tall guy. Everybody remembers the tall guy.”

“Most people remember me for my concave chest.”

Her eyes doubled in size. “Bullshit. Let me look.”

I raised my shirt, and she scooted in, squinting her eyes to get a better view. 

“Can I touch it?” she said. I nodded. She placed her hand gently beneath my neck. The warmth of her hand spread throughout my body, and my stomach tingled. She stroked up and down the deep crevice, feeling every impression between the cartilage of my rib cage. I wanted to hold her right there, but perhaps having her feel me up was much more pleasant. 

“Do you like mix CDs?” she said.

I nodded.

“I’m going to make you one. Will you make me one?”

I nodded again, and the next thing I knew I was writing her number down in my pocket notebook.

At Darren’s, I was sipping a Corona thinking about what had happened. I virtually did nothing but run into her, and I got her number. There was no time to break down what just happened though, because I had a mix to make. In my head, I started with Randy Newman’s “Baltimore.” The Eagles play on that record, so I thought of “Lyin’ Eyes,” which reminded me of John Coltrane’s “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes.” Coltrane got his big break in the Miles Davis Quintet, so the natural progression was to continue with “Milestones.” My logic ultimately ended up creating a mix cd spanning five discs, reminding me of late night infomercials where “Captain America” from Easy Rider gives a brief history of flower power and the free love generation, and then explains about how terrible bands like the Cowsills and Strawberry Alarm Clock defined their decade. This mix is going to make her love me, I thought.

A few days later, I met her at the Burger King version of Starbucks, the Coffee Bean, and we exchanged mixes. She also had a heaping pile of discs to exchange. I was sold. We were getting married. 

I told her my insane reasoning for the song choice on the mix, and she laughed at me. 

“Mine wasn’t that elaborate,” she said. “I just wanted to give you a broad perspective of what I listen to.” 

I opened the first jewel case and read the track listings. The first two songs were by my least favorite band: The Byrds. “Turn! Turn! Turn!” was her favorite. I realized then that I couldn’t jump into anything too quickly. She couldn’t be trusted. It was a terrible first impression. But the rest of the mixes seemed okay. We shared love for Randy Newman and Paul Simon, she turned me on to Vetiver and Erik Satie, I showed her Juliette Gréco and Harry Nilsson, and we were both suckers for Coldplay. 

She played with my hands at the table and laughed at all my jokes. “You’re cool,” she said. Nobody ever told me that, and meant it. Both of us had long legs, and our knees kept colliding under the table. The first few times it happened, we’d apologize to each other and laugh, but after the sixth time our knees connected, we just left them that way. I felt her warmth again, and there was so much breath contained in my chest I was on the verge of combustion. Her infatuation with the Byrds was something I could get over. As their hit proclaimed, “To everything/turn, turn, turn/there is a season/turn, turn, turn/and a time to every purpose/under heaven.” It was our time to be together, and to worry about anything else would have been meaningless.

We went to her car and drove around town listening to our mixes. Late August is pleasant in Las Vegas because the air cools in the night time, creating ideal weather for cranking music with the windows down. We ended up on the top floor of the parking garage at Red Rock Casino. The mountains surrounded us, and suddenly I felt like I lived in a punch bowl that God had maliciously filled with sand and dirt. We leaned back all the way in our chairs and listened. I stared at the roof of the car, but I could feel her beaming on me. 

“What’s up?” I said, turning to her.

“Nothing,” she said, then looked at the clock. “It’s almost eleven eleven. Get ready to make a wish.”

The clock changed and she closed her eyes. My grandfather always told me to “wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up faster,” but with a handful of wishes, one of them was bound to come true, and I wished I could be with her; life couldn’t be all shit.

Mel opened her eyes. “What’d you wish for?” I said.

“If I tell you then it might not come true,” she said.

“Everybody says that. It might not come true anyway.”

“You’re probably right.” She frowned.

“So, what is it?”

“I’m not going to say.” She covered her face with her brown, shoulder length hair.

I went back to staring at the ceiling and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” came on. It was so cheesy for that song to play at that moment, but I didn’t mind. 

“This is one of my favorites,” said Mel.

I turned to her and got close, pretending that I sang my voice out and needed to speak in her ear for her to hear me, but I said nothing, and we rested our heads on one another and listened.

“I like you, Mel,” I said.

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s harmonies whispered through the speakers. “Sail on silver girl/sail on by/your time has come to shine/all your dreams are on their way,” and she pulled my head down and kissed me. I wasn’t ready for it, but I kissed her lips gently. My heart was beating in sixteenth note rhythms with the song, and my blood rushed out of my head, resulting in me stupidly kissing her chin.

I lifted my head. “I wished for this,” I said.

She kissed me again. “Don’t talk about it.”

The fall semester began. I was at school all day, and Mel worked most of the time. At nights though, she would come to my house and I’d try to teach her about baseball as the post-season began, then make out in my garage listening to Paul McCartney. She was my girlfriend now. 

“Come to my house this weekend,” she said.

I agreed. It would be my first time. 

Her mom opened the door, and she was tall and pale, with gigantic hazel eyes like Mel, only older, but she was on her way out. She worked night shifts at the Bellagio. We were big children now, but I was surprised that her mother let me in, knowing that we would be alone, together. Her mom led me to the dinner table, sat me down, put a plate of food in front of me, and walked out the door.

“Are you sure it’s okay for me to be here?” I said.

“Yes,” said Mel. “Now eat, and then I’ll show you my room.”

We ate together and when I finished she stood up. “Let me show you my room,” she said, and walked away. I followed her and walked through her bedroom door. Her room was something she enjoyed showing off, though it was a place that many were not allowed to see. A world map was sprawled out over her wall, with tacks scattered across the continents; red indicating where she wanted to go, blue indicating where she had been. She was from Poland, and there were a couple of blue tacks around Europe. “I don’t know if those count,” she said. “I left Europe when I was seven. I don’t feel that I really experienced the cities I visited. I was too young.” I felt the same way, except I was feeling it at that moment. Everything that led up to that point in my life was a blur, as if Mel’s door was my mother’s birth canal. I felt an overwhelming sense of awareness closed inside her dim, sandy colored room. My hands were swelling, and I could feel the blood pumping through my fingers. I panicked and put my arms around her waist. She was eighteen, I was twenty-one. Our age difference wasn’t large, but it bothered me. I didn’t feel older. In her room, I felt completely opposite of who I thought I might have been in my car. She was in control, she knew things that I didn’t. I felt helpless and young.  

I propped my head up above her shoulder and let a breath out on her neck. She raised her head and moved her mouth close to mine, but I turned away and took a step toward the bed in the corner. It was a girl’s bed. A giant mass of white pillows were stacked near the wall, crisp, silky sheets lined the mattress, and a sleeping basset hound was tangled within the fluffy comforter, its long ears dangled off the edge. The dog sensed my presence and flipped upright and smacked itself in the face with its limp ears, then fought with the blanket, barking and whining, trying to force its way out. Mel let it loose, but it remained on the bed, staring at me, barking. “This is Agatha,” she said, petting its head. The dog looked like any other basset hound: light brown, with splotches of black and white splattered around it. I tried to pet her, but she would only bite my hands. “She’s usually quite friendly. I don’t know why she’s acting like this,” said Mel. That phrase sounded like a grave omen, but I didn’t let it get to me. The slobber made my skin itch, and I shoved my hands in my pockets. Clint Eastwood hung over Mel’s bed with a loaded gun, and she got serious. “Don’t hurt me”, she said, looking at me, then Clint. “He’s the good, but I can be the bad, and the ugly.” I looked down at the bed, and her basset hound stared at me with droopy, bloodshot eyes, growling. I couldn’t make that promise, and I shrugged it off, laughing nervously. Now the dog was getting to me.

Her record player sat on top of her dresser, and I stepped away from the bed and examined it. It was the same as mine: a cheap Crosley entertainment center, with a turntable, CD player, an mp3 adapter, and hidden off to the side was an unnecessary incision in the machine for cassette tapes. Framed on the wall, above the dresser, were her favorite albums of the moment, and for easy access she left the discs out on a metal vinyl rack. Neil Young’s Harvest was in the front. I lifted the vinyl off the rack and inspected its condition. Mel came up to me and poked my stomach.

“Aren’t we all miners for hearts of gold?” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I found you, didn’t I?”

I smiled crookedly and picked through a pile of paperbacks next to the turntable. The Road, The Perks of Being A Wallflower–everybody was reading that stuff, but then I found Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

“You’ve read this?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I had to read this in high school, and I hated it,” I said.

“Maybe you should read it again,” she said, then looked at me. I had a haircut the day before, so my hair was clean and slicked back, and I shaved in the morning. She continued. “You kind of look like a young Hemingway.”

For the next couple of nights, I’d go to her house after she got off work, and I became more comfortable being there. We would sulk in her dim sanctuary, sharing Paul Simon’s sentiment that rocks feel no pain, and islands never cry, feeling an overwhelming sense of security and comfort being surrounded by flimsy, torn paperbacks and dusty records.

“Will you lie in bed with me?” she said one night while we were watching television in her living room. 

“Let’s go,” I said, and she got up and pulled me toward her room. I stood and waited as she fooled with her iPod, then she leaped into her bed and folded her comforter over, exposing her slippery looking bedspread, while patting down the fresh linen. I slid in and she threw the blanket over my body, then she laid her arm across my stomach as I lifted mine, resting it around her waist. She had a Byrds playlist streaming through her Crosley console. The jangling, monotonous twelve-string guitar was blaring through the speakers, and Roger McGuinn was singing in his wimpy impression of Bob Dylan. In the backyard, I could hear Agatha barking.

I kissed Mel and then she forced herself on top of me. Kissing led to touching, and touching led to shirts unbuttoning, and unbuttoning led to pants unzipping, and suddenly, we were both in our underwear. She laughed at how hairy my legs were, but she didn’t care. Her skin was warm and sticky against mine, but that was most-likely my fault, because I was sweating barrels. She sat up and unhooked her bra, and I watched her breasts dangle. I sat up. She grabbed the sides of my boxers and pulled them down, then paused.

“Am I doing something wrong?” she said, looking down, then up at me, then down again.

“No. It’s my fault,” I said. “My head isn’t where it needs to be.”

“Yeah, it’s supposed to be pointing north.”

I sunk into the bed.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “What are you thinking about? Do you not like me?”

“I don’t know. I think I’m tired.”

She began tonguing my neck and chest, hoping it would resuscitate my flaccid penis, but it was over; it was dead on arrival. I got up and went to the bathroom. In the mirror I stared at my naked body, and what I saw in the mirror didn’t feel like the man that was standing before it. I felt young and helpless. The reflection in the mirror made me wonder who I was, and if the real me was the flesh, or the representation. I took a pee, and went back to Mel’s room.

Mel was still waiting for me in the bed, and I crawled back in with her.

“Should I try again?” she said.

I shook my head. “I better leave.”

She pulled the covers off of us and crawled out with me. We both dressed. I held her, kissed her, and told her goodbye. 

When I walked outside it was past midnight, and it was cold. I got in my car and shut the stereo off, listening only to the breeze fluttering through the broken passenger seat window that didn’t roll up all the way. There was no one on the road and I drove slowly. I repeatedly punched the steering wheel, because I knew it was over between Mel and Me. It wouldn’t be the same. But It wasn’t right to begin with.

The cold continued on into the next day, and I was okay with that, because that called for more clothes. I didn’t want to take my clothes off for fifty years, not in front of another person at least. 

Mel didn’t talk to me for a week, and when she started talking to me again it was like having a conversation with white noise: she’d respond, but say nothing, fizzing out a bunch of nonsense. She started driving to Apple Valley, California every weekend after the incident to visit her friends, and I didn’t see her around anymore. It was over. She finally ended it one weekend while she was in California. A break up text. Worse than breaking up in person, over the phone, and by mail. A break up telegram would have been better. At least I could have been sung to.

After time went on Mel would come around, and I’d go around looking for her, but we could never get past making mix cd’s for one another. I was afraid to hug her, to hold her, to kiss her; I didn’t want to tell her I loved her. I loved her.

It’s pretty to think that Mel and I could have had a life together, but it’s meaningless to speculate. There is no true love, because every day is new. Everyone has a chance with love. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. Love turns with the seasons. Love turns with the world. To everything, turn, turn, turn.